Operation Southern Cross - 02 (4 page)

“Why did they shoot at us then?” Autry wondered aloud.

Mungo just shrugged. “Why did North Korea attack the USS
Pueblo
years ago? Why did North Vietnam fire on two American destroyers back in 1964? Why does anything like this happen? They probably
want
to start a war.”

Autry pushed the photos away from him in disgust.

“Well, if just one of our guys had gotten killed,” he said almost under his breath, “then I’d give them their war at about seven o’clock tomorrow morning. As it is, though, we’re lucky we made it through. We’ll just leave this one for the Einsteins in Washington.”

With that, Autry and Mungo got up and headed towards the ship’s sick bay to visit their injured men, momentarily leaving McCune alone with his murky coffee.

“Where the hell is Venezuela?” the young pilot thought aloud.

NO SOONER HAD XBAT’S COPTERS SLAMMED ABOARD
her deck when the
Lexington
received new orders from the Pentagon.

The plans to proceed through the Panama Canal and onto San Diego had been scuttled. The
Lex
was to turn around and head back for Corpus Christi instead.

The orders didn’t go into detail on the reasons for the change—but then again, they didn’t have to. The
Lex
had floated into the middle of a serious international incident, one that could erupt into a full-blown military confrontation at any minute. The brass didn’t want the old carrier anywhere near the trouble zone. As Corpus Christi already had facilities for her, that’s where the Pentagon wanted the
Lex
to go.

But surprisingly, a different branch of the U.S. government had other plans for the Blue Ghost.

THE SUN WAS JUST COMING UP WHEN THE BLACK
Bell Textron helicopter appeared on the northern horizon, about twenty miles out from the
Lexington.

The carrier’s skeleton crew was exhausted by this time. Again, most were Naval Reserve guys, middle-aged vets of aircraft-carrier operations who’d been handed one last adventure to round off their careers. Many of them had looked on the
Lexington
ferry cruise as a sort of lark, similar to what a few private veterans’ groups had been doing recently, sailing World War II era ships across the Atlantic for museum berths in the States. Never had they expected anything like this.

In the hours before dawn, the crew had worked nonstop clearing the old carrier’s deck of helicopters, crashed and otherwise. This too had been ordered by the Pentagon. With a major international crisis about to break, they wanted all evidence of XBat and its battered copters out of sight as quickly as possible.

Getting the working copters below had been a bitch. Most of them had intentionally blown out their tires on landing so they wouldn’t roll off the carrier. This meant the copters had to be dragged to the
Lex
’s only working flight elevator, which then had to be raised and lowered manually, a task that took shifts of twenty crewmen up to two hours each to perform for one cycle, slowly turning the gears that moved the platform.

Once the nine workable choppers were below, the crew began getting rid of the wreckage left on top. Both the pair of Chinooks and a UH-60 gunship that had crashed on landing had burned completely through. All that remained were their shells, unstable, sharp and dangerous. Because the carrier’s lone deck truck could only handle so much, most of the work had to be done by hand, piece by piece, with three teams of 50 men each sifting through the carcasses and tossing anything they could lift over the side of the ship.

Through it all, the members of XBat were right down there with the
Lex
’s crew, Autry included, pushing and pulling and sweating and throwing junk over the side. It was a miserable way to spend the night, but by 0530 hours, they had the deck cleared.

The strange helicopter appeared shortly after that.

AUTRY WAS JUST AS EXHAUSTED, DIRTY AND SWEATY
as the rest of them when the unmarked Bell landed on the
Lex
. The grand old ship was now steaming north, all engines full, hoping to make Corpus Christi by late evening the following day. This was something that couldn’t happen soon enough for Autry or his men.

The civilian copter set down just off the carrier’s island; its pilots had radioed the
Lex
ahead of time saying they had a passenger onboard who was carrying important information for XBat. When the copter relayed a series of code sequences that Autry recognized, he told the
Lex
’s Captain Eliot it was OK to let the copter set down.

The Bell’s side door opened and a fortyish man with a wild shock of Kennedy-esque hair climbed out. Autry recognized him right away. It was Gary Weir, a colleague who’d worked with XBat on the recent North Korean operation.

Weir was a nice guy; he and Autry went way back. But he didn’t work for the Navy or Army Special Operations, or any branch of the military. He was CIA—and after the Korean adventure, he’d been put in charge of the agency’s highly classified Covert Action Division, the group that handled the country’s deepest secret operations.

Autry took one look at him and groaned.
What the hell is he doing here?

They met at the copter’s door, shaking hands warmly if a little uncertainly. Remaining inside the copter with the pilot was a man dressed all in black, including a very distinctive black fedora, with a black scarf pulled up over his mouth. Strange garb for the Caribbean, Autry thought. The guy looked like something from a spy movie.

Autry and Weir scrambled out from under the copter’s rotors, heading to the main hatch on the side of the island, where Captain Eliot was waiting. Autry did the introductions. Weir was the first CIA agent Eliot had ever met.

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Weir asked him once their handshake was done.

Eliot nodded. “I’ve arranged a cabin where you and Colonel Autry can speak in private.”

“I appreciate that, Captain,” Weir replied. “But I meant the three of us. I need you to be included in this too.”

THEY SETTLED AT A TABLE IN THE SHIP’S DILAPIDATED
officers’ galley, Weir spreading some paperwork in front of him. Eliot poured them some of the mess hall’s cruddy coffee. The CIA agent took a sip of his and almost turned green. Autry knew better, simply nudging his away.

“How many helicopters do you still have operational?” was Weir’s first real question to Autry. “Officially, I mean.”

“Officially?” Autry replied. “Nine. Why? Are they replacing the three we lost already?”

Weir’s shrug was noncommittal.

“Eventually they will, I guess,” he said. “And how about your men? I understand about a dozen are down out of, what? Fifty-two?”

“Burns and fragment wounds, mostly,” Autry confirmed. “Nothing life threatening. Is this a debriefing on what happened the other night?”

Weir pretended to look at his paperwork.

“Someone else will be taking a full statement on that later,” he said. “We’ve got something else we have to take care of first.”

“Something more important than two assholes from Venezuela trying to shoot us down last night?” Autry asked.

The CIA agent chose to ignore that question too. Instead he turned to Eliot. “Captain, I know the circumstances of your being here, and believe me, there are heaps of gratitude for you up in D.C. for helping out. But now I have to ask you something: Is this ship still seaworthy?”

Eliot was surprised by the question. So was Autry.

The
Lex
’s captain replied truthfully, “For now, yes.”

Weir made a note on his paperwork. “And had you not been interrupted, you would have made it all the way to San Diego?”

“We’d hoped to,” Eliot told him. “She’s really holding together well. So far.”

“But that trip to San Diego, it was going to be twelve hundred miles or so?”

“Yes…”

“And if you had to, could you sail at least half that distance, just in another direction?”

It was another funny question. Eliot thought about it for a moment, but then again answered yes.

Weir turned back to Autry. His face had softened a bit.

“I’m sorry, Bobby,” he said. “I know you want to get your guys home. And I know you’ve been through a lot. But like I said, something has come up.”

Autry sank deeper into his chair, even as Eliot sat up straighter in his. He’d heard that line from Weir once before—and a few hours later, he was trudging through the blinding snow of North Korea looking for a Doomsday Bomb.

“That character up in my chopper?” Weir said, nodding up toward the flight deck. “He has to get somewhere in a hurry. It’s best that he in go quietly, but if someone has to blast him in, so be it. Even if the LZ is hot, he’s got to be dropped off.”

“Who is he?” Autry groaned.

Weir shrugged. “Beats me. Some very important intelligence asset, at least to some people up in D.C. So much so, his code name is Superstar. Personally I find that kind of embarrassing, but what he has to do and where he has to go is a very high priority to them, which means it is now a very high priority to me.”

Autry went even lower in his seat. In the black ops business this was known as an in and out. Essentially dropping an operative to the ground in some hostile environment, and if all is kosher, leaving him there for a later pickup. If not kosher, then making noise until he can get away. This was bread-and-butter stuff for the regular TF-160 air battalions. Autry had done dozens of them.

But he sure didn’t want to do this one.

His reason went beyond getting his men back on solid ground. It was more personal than that. It had to do with his marriage. Or what was left of it.

The divorce rate among Special Ops members was always very high. Long periods away from home. The emergency calls in the middle of the night. The need for a huge adrenaline rush every few weeks. It was tough for any spouse to take.

And so it was for Autry’s wife. She’d left him several years ago, ending a romance that had started back when they were both kids. Though they’d never divorced, they’d communicated very sparsely over the intervening months—until just a few weeks ago. It was at the end of the North Korean hair-raiser, after Autry and his guys were safely out of hostile territory, the Navy somehow got a well-traveled letter to him.

It was from his wife. She was going to be in the Atlanta area soon and asked if they could get together, maybe talk to a counselor, maybe patch things up. The letter blew Autry away. At that point he would have met with Carl Jung if it meant getting back with her. He’d certainly been no angel, but their split had affected him more than he’d ever imagined. He was still deeply in love with her and wanted her back in his life. Simple as that.

Their date was set a week from now.
That
was why Autry wanted to get back home as soon as possible. But with Weir obviously about to give XBat another mission, meeting her at the appointed time and place might be in jeopardy. And it wasn’t like he could just call her up or have anyone else contact her. Not when he was hanging between two highly secret missions.

Besides, he didn’t even know her phone number.

“Are you saying everyone else is occupied?” Autry asked Weir finally.

The CIA agent nodded. The Nightstalkers had four regular air battalions, each one containing two dozen aircraft. It also had a training battalion which featured some of its best pilots as instructors—only the best could teach some of the things TF-160 members were called on to do. Usually at least one unit was stateside, in the process of refitting or doing advanced training.

“Two of 160’s battalions are in the Gulf,” he said. “One is in Kabul. The fourth unit is in Asia somewhere, and half the training unit is with them. This thing I have came up rather quick, and well, just by fate you guys happened to be in the neighborhood.”

But Autry was having trouble believing his ears. He’d been involved in so many black ops he couldn’t count them all. But this? They’d nearly been shot down just hours before. Now the Agency was sending them out again. So soon?

Autry just shook his head. “Does the Navy, the Pentagon know about this?”

Weir shrugged. “You serve directly at the pleasure of the president,” he replied.

“But for the record, my guys are dog tired and looking up from the gutter,” Autry told him. “Plus, I have issues I have to deal with back home.”

The agent nodded. “So noted.”

That’s when Autry just surrendered. Further protest would be futile. Once the wheels were set in motion in these things, they were almost impossible to stop. The reunion with his wife was still seven days away. In theory, he could still do whatever Weir wanted and get back to Georgia with time to spare. Or so he hoped.

Weir looked across the table at him, a hopeful glimmer in his eye. “So, can you do me this favor, Bobby?”

Autry finally nodded. “If you
really
need this guy to get somewhere, we’ll give it a shot.”

The CIA agent immediately took out his S2S cell phone—as in “scramble to satellite”—and pushed in a series of numbers. In seconds, he was talking to someone up at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

“The match is on,” he said simply. He listened for a moment, then said: “First round immediately.”

The agent listened another few moments. Then he started to say: “Nine helicopters operational…” but suddenly stopped.

The line had gone dead.

“Son of a bitch,” Weir muttered, looking at his S2S phone like it was a Wal-Mart reject. “That’s the second time that’s happened today.”

Autry was too tired to laugh. Though the expensive high-tech phone was supposed to be failure-proof, his own S2S phone had failed at a very inconvenient time after the Pablo strike—and just before they got jumped.